


Cinnamon Girl

by Blu1376



Category: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (TV)
Genre: A bit bloody in places, But rooted in real life Lenny, Drug Use, Eventual Romance, F/M, canon divergent i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:09:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21847552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blu1376/pseuds/Blu1376
Summary: Midge lives in a cotton-candy world, and if she wants to go out of the confines of the Upper West Side and into the murky waters of showbiz, she’s going to have to learn the ropes - and fast.One-shot Lenny/Midge, based on the life of Lenny Bruce which we don’t really see on the show.
Relationships: Lenny Bruce (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)/Miriam "Midge" Maisel
Comments: 12
Kudos: 148





	Cinnamon Girl

> _All the pills that you take,  
_ _Violet, blue, green, red,  
_ _to keep me at arm’s length  
_ _won’t work. _
> 
> _You try to push me out  
_ _but I just find my way back in,   
_ _Violet, blue, green, red to keep me out, _
> 
> _I win. _

——————————————————————

It was a shock, that’s for sure. Midge had always lived in a cotton candy world and she knew it; but it was 1960 now and all you had to do was turn on a T.V. or listen to a record and you found the cacophonous riot of the new decade shoved firmly in your face. But she still hadn’t been ready for last night. As the veil of sleep began to lift away from her eyes she turned in Lenny’s arms to watch his calm features in the morning light. He looked fine. A bit pallid and sickly but that came form a decade of working in the dead of night. Brushing her fingers through the dark curls that rested on his forehead she wiggled closer, smiling as he unconsciously adjusted to the movement, winding his arms around her tighter. 

It was almost like nothing bad had happened at all. As they lay there together she felt her mind starting to let go of the memory, to chalk it up to one really bad night.

The problem was she could hear Susie’s voice hovering in the back of her mind, telling her she wasn’t stupid, wasn’t innocent, wasn’t just some doe-eyed housewife, that she understood the world perfectly and she had to stop acting like she didn’t… That was truer now than ever, and part of her couldn’t let go of the realisation that this was all real, he really was sick… if last night was an indication, very fucking sick. But she could help. She was Miriam goddamn Masiel and if there was one thing she was good at it was fixing problems. Lenny stirred beside her, slowly moving a hand to clasp her tiny waist and pull her tight against him. He didn’t even open his eyes before he kissed her, and for a moment she hoped that in his semi-conscious state he hadn’t mistaken her for his ex-wife. When his eyes finally opened cautiously in the (in his opinion) far too harsh morning light he pressed another soft kiss to her lips, and Midge felt the horrors of the night before melt away in the warmth of his embrace.

—————-—————————————————

When Lenny had called she had only been half awake, basking in the glow of her new-old apartment and wallowing in the shame of her recent ignominious dismissal. Midge couldn’t remember giving him her number, but she must have told him where she lived in order for him to send those flowers – she had been so impressed that he’d remembered her favourite colour, she almost hadn’t noticed her mother comparing her to a hooker. He must have just called the building and asked for her apartment, or had one very weird conversation with the Nobel Laureate who was living upstairs in her parents place… it was somewhere in the middle of this train of thought that Midge realised she hadn’t been listening to him, or rather, that he wasn’t speaking at all.

“Lenny?” She prompted, listening to the slow breathing on the other end of the line. “….Lenny? Are you there?”

“Huh?”

The response was slow and laboured, he sounded annoyed… or confused… not like the fast-talking king of comedy she was getting oh so used to.

“I said, are you there? You went quiet on me… very uncharacteristic I must say”

“I uhhhh… yeah… what do you want?”

Midge couldn’t help but laugh into the receiver, but it was a little uneasy, she had seen him drunk, but this was _drunk. _

“Lenny, it’s Midge, you know ‘sensational’ Midge. You called me, is everything okay?”

There was silence again, and she wasn’t sure whether she should be annoyed or worried.

“….. right, Midge… I was just thinkin’ about you….”

“Obviously not hard enough to come up with a topic of conversation.” She laughed again, but she was really worried now, sitting all the way up from her recumbent position on the coach.

“S’abad night… got busted… got bailed… same hegdesch as usual…” There was silence for a while, and Midge made an encouraging noise in an attempt to coax him to the end of the sentence. “Then I got a tase for some cool guys I know…cool cool guys… alwaysgotta taste for ya…” By now she was beyond confused, but at least he seemed to be going somewhere. “… people overdose on this shit all the time y’know… just last week Honey did it… or that was last month… anyway, ya just schlep her in a cold shower and give her a couple gentle slaps and she’s fine as…” Silence again.

“Lenny… hey… HEY… LENNY… ” Midge was standing now, she wasn’t sure how that would help, but this felt like a standing situation. The word overdose rang in her ears and she thought about all the stories the guys in the Stage Deli had told her about the infamous Lenny Bruce and his penchant for sticking himself with needles. The quite on the other end of the line was deafening, and she was just about to really scream at him when she heard a cough and a mumble.

“Lenny, I’m going to come over okay? I’ll just come to you and… I’ll bring Susie, she’ll know what to do… or Benjamin, he’s a doctor, but he probably wouldn’t come… what would I do? Ring him up and say ‘hey, the comic I took you to see on our first date has taken an overdose, I know I left you for no good reason but could you just pop round and help out?’” She was really talking to herself now, but the receiver was still glued to her ear – she had almost forgotten he was still there until his wavering voice croaked out quietly.

“…no… I said I _thought _I took one… but I think m’fine now… I’ll just shoot an amp of meth and it’ll balance me out… nice and steady…” Midge didn’t need a medical degree or a jazz trumpet to know that that sounded like one hell of a bad idea.

“Lenny, please, just have a glass of water” Oh sure Midge, she thought to herself, water, that’ll help. “I’ll be there in a flash.”

The second she hung up Midge phoned the Gaslight, Susie wasn’t there… wasn’t at her place either… what use was a personal manager if she wasn’t there when Midge definitely needed managing. She left a garbled message with Jackie, hoping that he would actually remember to give her this one. She couldn’t face the idea of calling Benjamin, she would asses the situation on the ground first, before she dove head first into her own mistakes.

The cab ride was agonising. She hadn’t even bothered putting on anything that resembled an outfit, it was all mismatched, pedal pushers and a jumper that could well have belonged to Joel. When she got up to his apartment it was dark, his camel coat lay in a heap on the floor of the hall, and without even thinking about why she was doing it she picked it up and hung it on the coat-stand by the door. She found him in the living room, sitting in a crumpled slouch on the floor in front of the coach, his head lolling back onto the cushions.

“Lenny…”

Midge didn’t want to turn on the light, or even really go over to where he was sitting, it was all far too real. Swallowing her fear she knelt on the floor beside him and shook his shoulder gently. Nothing. She tried again, harder this time, using both hands she shook his dead weight as best she could while calling his name. When he fell forwards onto the carpet she really had to resist the urge to scream – he was dead, she knew it, he just _flopped_ like one of Ester’s rag dolls… only dead people did that, Lenny Bruce was dead… she had found the dead body of Lenny Bruce…

When he began to splutter she actually did scream, or more she squawked, the sound escaping her lips in a mixture of relief and fear. “Get ahold of yourself Miriam .” She mumbled, shuffling along the floor to sit beside his head. It was then she noticed the little glass bottles knocking against her knees. Methedrine, dexedrine, dilaudid… she had heard all those words before, thrown around by guys in the back of jazz clubs, but she didn’t know what any of them did… or what the hell you were meant to do with someone who had been taking them. She thought back to that night she had found Shy on the boat, all beaten and bloodied and drunk out of his skull… she hadn’t known what to do then either, but she’d done something… and that was what she was going to have to do now.

“Lenny.” She was more forceful this time, like she was telling Ethan off for not eating his eggs.

“Lenny, look at me.” She held his head gently in her hands, leaning her face close to his and calling his name once more.

When his eyes flickered open she felt the overwhelming urge to punch him. Square in the fucking jaw. Asshole. Who does this to themselves?

“….Midge… hey midge… it’s Midge… beautiful Mrs Maisel… why are we… where…”

“Hi, Lenny Bruce. We’re in your house, well, we’re in the middle of your floor to be precise… you wanna sit up for me? Pretty please?” She half dragged him so his back was up against the couch once more, pushing his disheveled hair from his face to get a good look at him.

“… oh Lenny… you have been in the wars…” His jacket was off and his cuffs unbuttoned, in the dark she could see what she assumed was a blood a stain spreading out from his elbow over his white shirt.

“Only the second one…” he mumbled.

Midge was taken aback by this almost entirely lucid sentence.

“What?”

“In the wars…” he repeated “Only the second one… but I was on a boat…”

“You fought in the second world war?” She couldn’t conceal her surprise, and found herself momentarily distracted from her panic by this revelation. At least he was talking to her, that was a good sign. Keep him talking. She was good at talking. 

“Uh huh… I was… sixteen? Seventeen? Whatever… we were on a boat and we shot shit at other boats…”

“With a summery like that it’s a wonder you’re not a general by now.” Midge smiled, her hands still gently cupping his head.

“Lenny, what happened tonight? What did you do?”

He looked bemused for a moment, his eyes switching between focusing on her and wandering off into the back of his head. “Uhhh… I came home to shoot… and now I don’t feel so hot…”

“No shit, you look just wonderful.” Even in this light she could tell he was white as a sheet, his skin clammy with sweat, hot and cold all at once. She sat for a minute, unsure of the what the hell she was supposed to do. Remembering part of their garbled phone conversation she decided a cold shower was the logical step to take. “Come on… uhh… I guess we’re going to have to crawl? We’ll make it fun, like you’re Ester…” There she goes again, talking to herself, but she knows there’s no way in hell she’ll be able to lift him off the floor by herself, and she highly doubted that he would be going anywhere under his own steam.

Eventually she managed to get him to half shuffle half stumble his way to the bathroom and into the tub, still fully clothed. It was a nice bathroom Midge thought to herself, she liked how some of the tiles were a slightly darker shade of blue… it added depth to the walls… just when she felt that she had a handle on the situation she turned on the light. She hadn’t been ready for that, not at all. In the bright white light of the bathroom she could actually see just how bad he looked and she almost screamed all over again. His hair was damp and plastered to his head, his skin a sanguine tone that made the reddish purple colour around his eyes all the more apparent. The small stain she had noticed in the other room turned out to be huge splatters of blood all up both arms of his shirt, with some spread on his face where she assumed he must have let his head rest in his hands. Swallowing a wave of panicked nausea she set about undoing his shoes, folding each sock neatly inside and placing them together under the sink.

Luckily for everyone there was a detachable shower head, and as she turned it to the coldest temperature she found herself stroking his hair with her free hand, whispering quite platitudes like she did when one of the kids was sick and needed soothing. Lenny didn’t seem too perturbed by the cold water, and she took the opportunity to unceremoniously pull off his bloodstained shirt over his head. Now she could see his arms the nausea swiftly returned. The pale skin was covered in clusters of livid red marks , and in the crook of one elbow there was a large blackish-blue lump the size of a golf ball that oozed blood into the running water.

“Oh god… Lenny…” For a moment she felt like crying, hot tears pricked in her eyes and her breath came in short gasps. Was this what he meant? That day in the police station. The day he had told her what an awful world she was getting herself into?

“I’m not very good…” He was looking at her with childlike curiosity, big dark eyes blinking slowly. “I always miss… most of the time I get some cat to spike for me… I always miss…”

Picking up the shower head she doused him with the freezing water again, it seemed to be working. His eyes were staying open now, and he tried to push away the chrome shower head when the stream got in his eyes. After a few minutes he finally revolted, trying to inelegantly drag himself out of the wet tub.

“Hey, no wait…” Midge held out her hands to help him, letting him lean against her until he was sitting on the bathmat, looking like a body that had been dragged from the Hudson river.

They sat in silence for a moment, Lenny dripping on her quietly while she stroked the back of his neck gently. She almost asked him what she was meant to do now? As the party with all the experience it seemed only sensible that he set the agenda, but he didn’t seem up to sentence construction, let along agenda-setting.

“Lenny… how do you feel?” A weak effort, she knew that, but it might at least give her something to work with.

“Better…” He nodded dumbly and swayed on the spot, like some great lumbering animal that had been shot with a tranquilliser dart. “… sick…”

Midge wrapped the biggest towel she could find around his shoulders while he sat curled over the toilet bowl, trying her best to dry him off enough that he wouldn’t catch his death on the bathroom floor. She needed to call someone, a doctor… she had no idea how to make this better… but she had learnt plenty in her whistle stop tour of the night-club scene the past year. Doctors were out, you call a doctor and they know you’re a junkie, they know you’re a junkie and they can lock you away for years in one those ‘state hospitals’ that were fooling nobody. It was prison without trial or fixed sentencing, Papa would be proud with her for realising that. They sat on the cold wet bathroom floor for what felt like an age, she tried giving him water and coffee and finally she resorted to trying to take the bloodstains out of the living room carpet with some baking soda and salt she had found in the cupboards. When in doubt, do what you know, that’s what Susie told her.

Eventually Lenny looked her in the eye, she thought for the first time since she had arrived, and took her shaking hand in his.

“I feel better now.”

She nodded carefully, squeezing his hand. “Now probably isn’t the best time to tell you you’re going to need a new carpet.”

Lenny laughed, barely, but it was a laugh. Dropping her hand he clutched the towel, pulling it tight around his shoulders as his teeth started to chatter. “Fuck… it’s cold.”

“Come on, we can get you in bed.” Midge clasped hold of his forearms to help him up, careful of the angry open wounds that ran up and down his veins.

“Imagine that I made a joke about beds and you…” Lenny mumbled, resting more of his weight than she was really able to cary on Midge as they hobbled to the bedroom.

It wasn’t too hard to get him into some pyjamas, considering the uphill-battle they had had getting him to sit up it was childs play. Midge turned on the bedside light, propping herself behind him with his arm laid across her lap. They sat in silence while she gently cleaned the angry looking sores, Lenny’s head resting on her shoulder, and neither of them said anything when she pressed a few gentle kisses to his temple.

“You know, if you die, I’ll have no one to tell me how brilliant I am – it’s very selfish of you.”

His eyes were closed, but Lenny let out a gentle snort of amusement. “You have plenty of people to tell you how brilliant you are, you can stand some casualties and still scrape together a fan club.”

It was the first full sentence she had gotten out of him all night, and she smiled at the improvement, carefully covering up his bandaged arm and shifting onto her side to face him. “Okay, but who will get drunk and commiserate with me when I feel sorry for myself?”

“Susie… or your husband who was your ex-but-is-now-not.”

“What if I don’t want them?”

They had both slid down into the bed until they were lying side by side. Noticing him start to shake a little, Midge pulled the blankets over them, rubbing his hands as if she were tying to warm him up on a cold evening.

Midge smiled, letting both of their hands rest on the mattress, still partly intertwined. “How about this one, if you die now, you’ll never get that date.”

With this statement Lenny opened his eyes, something of their familiar twinkle visible beneath the fog of his chemical experiments. “Well, I got you into bed didn’t I? What more can I ask for? There’s your bed joke.”

She couldn’t quite bring herself to laugh, not just yet, most of her still wanted to burst into tears. “Better late than never.” He closed his eyes again as her hand brushed the side of his face, resting on his cheek which was still not at all the right colour. “If you make it through to the morning we can renegotiate.”

“Deal.”

—————————————————————————-

When Susie finally got the message from Jackie – something along the lines of “_Midge thinks Lenny Bruce is dead or somethin” _\- she charged round to Lenny’s place, mildly terrified of what she might find. She was many things was Midge, amazing really, in so many ways… but she wasn’t streetwise. She could picture her now, in some flouncy pink number, trying to figure out what to do while a man turned blue in front of her. After following the trail of blood and damp carpets to the bedroom she found them, the princess and the junkie frog, all curled up fast asleep, like nothing in the world was wrong. Midge was nestled in Lenny’s arms, her head buried in his neck so all that was visible was a puff of brown hair. Lenny certainly didn’t look dead, Susie thought to herself, he looked like shit alright, but he was still breathing. She stood for a moment, watching them sleep and wondering what the fuck they were going to do now.

Susie knew how Midge felt about Lenny, and she knew how Lenny felt about Midge… but she also knew how Lenny felt about those little glass bottles… and Midge would never understand that. She would try to fix it, the magical upper east side fairy princess, so used to fixing people’s problems with a smile and a brisket… she would never understand why she couldn’t fix him. Heading into the kitchen to find some kind of fucking coffee making device, Susie couldn’t help but remember all those conversations she had had with Reggie before they’d been booted off the tour. Midge had become her world, like a best friend and a disobedient child all rolled into one, she wanted to protect her. Especially from people like Lenny, it was the loveable ones that were dangerous, the ones that made you want to drown yourself in an effort to keep their fucking-endearing heads above the water. This was all going to end in tears. But she was fucked if she knew what she could do about that now.


End file.
